Tuesday, 29 March 2011

I've been hanging out a lot on Less Wrong, which is a community for people trying learn about being more rational.

Some of us are also programmers... so we've decided to get together and have a hackday (in London). But we're still trying to figure out what would be both cool/interesting *and* help us build our rationality, *and* still be doable by an odd collection of random hackers over a single day.

One idea would be to have a go at designing serious games - games specifically created for improving our rationality, a bit like Lumosity builds games for improving mental agility.

But we need help coming up with ideas. Ideas that are not only small enough to fit into the time-schedule of a hackday... but that also demonstrably improve some aspect of our rationality.

If you have any ideas (or would be able to comment on those we've got), come over to our site and add our comments to the Designing serious games discussion.

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Angry Birds is one of the most successful games out there right now - consuming millions of hours worldwide every day. What have they got right? This article tears down the user experience and explains Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular. It's a thorough and thought-provoking look into the sorts of things that make up a truly engaging user experience.

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

"It’s important... because it makes creative work more productive and makes costly blunders less likely...
"To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest."

Thursday, 17 March 2011

It's one of those common-sense things that we often forget, that people will live up to your expectations. Expect the worst and that's what you'll get, but expect great things and you'll get the best. Seth talks about trust as it relates to, say, a restaurant trusting you to pay *after* you've eaten your meal... or Tiffany's trusting you to try on their expensive jewels... but obviously this has application to the full breadth of life.

For example, an employer trusting their employees to be productive and loyal builds an environment that is more conducive to productivity and loyalty, than one who micromanages productivity, or constructs labyrinthine rules about allowed corporate protocol.

Yep, sometimes your trust will be abused... life is like that. But sometimes you have to risk a little, to gain a lot.

Friday, 11 March 2011

The laws are changing around cookies. From the 25th May, websites require explicit, opt-in consent for the use of certain cookies. It seems to be mainly (though not exclusively) aimed at targetted advertising, but it's worth having a read of a good overview of the upcoming cookie privacy laws to see if it will affect you.

Right now I have NFI how to actually remove the column... because trying:
alter table my_widgets drop column #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0xb5c35504>;Just results in: ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; , and it won't accept it if I put it in quotes either... so the column currently remains as is.

Luckily I was playing with a branch of the real system - so it's only my dev-box's code that has been mucked about... and I can change the migration before anybody else uses it... but this is seriously weird behaviour on Rails' part. Not a raised exception or even a raised eyebrow... it sailed right through and is continuing on regardless.